In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as their international word of the year. It was a year of firsts, a year of disruption. It was the first time the United States elected a president with no prior political or military experience and also the year of the shocking withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union. Two somewhat bewildering and certainly disturbing events that festered and emerged from lies, bigotry and disinformation—among other varying and complex factors. The term morphed into a buzzword around this time, being vaguely thrown around in publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian without a concrete definition. Despite the mid-2010s being deemed the “era” of post-truth, it more so felt like a mood, a dark cloud that hung over everyone’s heads for the first time, bewitching X feeds and break rooms alike. Something shifted.
Attacks on traditional paradigms of expertise, heightened distrust in the media and a lack of faith in public institutions have become commonplace. Despite these anti-intellectual, anti-traditional expertise sentiments that increasingly pervade our lives today, it is paramount to resist the notion that post-truth is a completely new, digital media-based phenomenon. Rather, post-truth is both a new and old problem, disturbingly timeless in both nature and consequence.
To understand what post-truth is, and why it is an oversight to consider it completely novel, it is important to address a common misconception about the prefix “post.” Rather than being used in a manner similar to “post-war,” denoting a purely temporal marker, the “post” of post-truth more closely resembles that of “postmodernism,” given the slipperiness of its temporality and the nature of the crisis: i.e. whether it is a political or epistemological (our agreed upon standards of how we know what we know) crisis, or somewhere in between. Giving post-truth the terminological weight of signifying a new time period ignores the fact that believability has always been fraught for marginalized populations.
If post-truth in its simplest form involves the disruption of truth and its production, as well as the perpetuation of untruths, it is a phenomenon as old as time itself. Post-truth is not merely an informational problem, but also one of power relations and skewed believability. UK-based feminist and media studies scholars Kathryn Claire Higgins and Sarah Banet-Weiser, for example, argue that believability is both the capability of being believed and the quality of being convincing. For them, “truth” is not something that can simply be done; rather, it is something that is earned. Structural forces, including but not limited to patriarchy, colonialism, classism and racism, all disrupt the formation and acceptance of truth by and from marginalized populations, such as people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and women.
Take, for instance, the horrific 1991 police brutality towards Rodney King during a speeding and driving-while-intoxicated arrest. King suffered from broken bones, bruises, bleeding, cuts and burns—all physical indicators of excessive force. A bystander recorded the evidence of police violence on a home movie camera, and the footage was (mis)used and manipulated in court to initially charge King with felony evading. The footage was slowed down to an almost imperceptible speed, where it was extremely difficult to tell who was primarily using force. King’s beating took place a year before the term post-truth is said to have been created by Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in an essay for The Nation magazine, but it still undeniably resembles an instance of post-truth: The disrupted dissemination and production of truth among public audiences, which in turn perpetuates untruth, specifically towards or affecting a person of a historically marginalized population.
Even before the manipulation of digital media and its use in the production of mis- and disinformation, as in King’s trial, a culture of normalized deception had already pervaded the United States. Former President Ronald Reagan, for example, weaponized a harmful, false stereotype and derogatory term about Black women, the “welfare queen,” in his speeches and political campaigning, which shaped public opinion about who receives public assistance and why. And even before the United States itself was established, historically documented instances of mass disinformation, such as the Salem Witch Trials, created widely accepted untruths, illustrating the impossibility of believability among certain marginalized populations as well as the force of both politics and epistemology in the production of (un)truth.
This long-standing reality of post-truth is not to say that, perhaps, the production of post-truth has not been exacerbated in the last decade. The accessibility of manipulating fact has undeniably expanded due to technological advancements, with people having the resources to make both deep fakes and cheap fakes at their fingertips, launch or participate in the production of disinformation campaigns or harness populist, anti-traditional expertise sentiments. This is the reality of our digital world today. However, this unusual subversion of power relations and intellectual authority as well as the mass-manipulation of fact amid technological innovation should not undermine the reality that the motives and results of disrupting truth have remained the same throughout history.
Reality today feels irresolvable for many of us regardless of age, gender, race and class. But this irresolvability has been known for decades, or even centuries, among certain populations. It is imperative to resist purely technocentric narratives surrounding post-truth while simultaneously recognizing the growing accessibility of manipulating facts. Two truths can co-exist. The only way out of—or perhaps the only way into—the vortex of post-truth is recognizing this coexistence and the disrupted logic of both fact and believability itself.